The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 29th, 2010
Observations:
1) For a guy who cites demagoguery of others as one of his chief annoyances, Joe Scarborough had zero issues painting a false picture on the tax cuts for the rich debate in his effort to appear on the right side of the issue. Apparently the right side of the issue is that people making 250,000 dollars a year or more in taxable income are the new tired and huddled masses in need of his defense. In his crosshairs are anyone who wants to explain to him that those 250,000 aren’t actually subject to a tax increase, its only the next subsequent dollars earned, thus not a primary income setback. Also in those same crosshairs are the two richest men in America who are on record now saying the Bush tax cuts are a chief fiscal culprit.
That outburst by Scarborough upon viewing the Buffet interview was embarrassing. It was nearly as embarrassing as the Senator-elect Kirk interview. These are two smart people looking you in the eye and lying to you selectively. In a leap of hypocrisy, Scarborough actually was the chief antagonist in the Kirk interview, beating even Howard Dean to the punch in the insolvency of Kirk’s responses, forgetting that Scarborough’s mathematical bonifides left the room just two hours earlier. This of course led to another critical but nuanced on set panic as the Buffet interview got replayed while Dean was still on with the cast, and rather than restate the 6 AM monstrosity, Scarborough had to duck and cover. I used to not notice the planned cover up activity, now it’s like a neon billboard.
2) Kirk was an absolute embarrassment. Yea, I have a dog in this fight, having been on the side of the tough to elect bankster Giannoulias in that election, and in complete admission that this was just more Tim Kaine disaster manufacturing. But Kirk is the new face of the voter who won’t accept tough answers and demands a government that leaks like a colander. If you could buy stock in rich people, now would be a good time, because we have elected 95 new legislators who will be handing the nations treasury to the richest 2% of the country and a newly accelerated rate, and without any recourse or return on investment whatsoever. And it was the 98% who don’t have any money anymore, or at least 40% of those who participate in midterm elections, that created this suicidal mandate.
To hear Kirk apply doublespeak logic to the real problems we face should be a cold shower reminder of the architects of the three Bush tax cuts. This stuff has been completely debunked by every economist and accountant who ever got out of college, yet the American public is going for it like the old ball of string trick, again.
3) And then there was the Wikileaks. Joe Scarborough plastered the face of his chief suspect on the screen no less than 5 times, a private in the army. Scarborough then sentenced the private to 25 years in prison even though there has been no trial or evidence presented. Joe Scarborough never lashed out at the ruler of Yemen for lying to his parliament, to the King of Saudi Arabia for war mongering, or to the State Department as a whole for having the internal maturity of Will Ferrell. No it’s none of these large institutional players doing anything wrong. It’s not the DOD’s fault that it’s getting mugged 52 million dollars at a time in Afghanistan. It’s a private in the army. That kind of scapegoating simply means we will make the same mistakes next week at our highest level.
Reverberating in my head is the weird championing of the Sebastian Junger movie, deserved sure, with the debunking of the organization that brought to light that Baghdad massacre of 17 civilians by a US helicopter gunship. I thought all weekend about the guy who was the shooter in the helicopter. He probably knew he was murdering people when he did it. He probably thought that the government was going to suppress details of his crime for self serving publicity and diplomacy reasons so his demons were limited to a very small sphere of judgment for his crime. Upon the Wikileaks disclosure, that sphere went from very small to global awareness, and likely will lead to his eventual prosecution. Junger is an award winning movie maker, Assange is a war criminal. That math doesn’t work.
Equally appalling is the treatment of the Rolling Stone article that damned General McChrystal when compared to the Wikileaks phenomenon. You probably think that the part of the equation that I’m complaining about was the treatment of the Rolling Stone author as a reviled hero compared to the reviled war criminal treatment Assange is getting. No that was the last paragraph, this paragraph is about the unequal treatment the sophomoric actions of our leaders get across the media, but how Morning Joe takes the prize for degrading this story to its most despotically surreal level as its core show discipline. The Peter King segment about extending the laws of terrorism to include the Wikileaks principals, similar in his mind to the extension of the RICO statutes for its convenience in ‘making up crimes as you go along’ mixed with the Jamie Rubin conjecture of Wikileaks as a ‘cyber attack’ shows that rational responsibility for your actions has taken a holiday.
Where were you when the Freedom of Information Act and the First Amendment were first successfully attacked under the guise of national security? King and Morning Joe were all to happy to start that fight this morning under the guise of terrorizing the Wikileaks phenomenon, and they were too busy with the scapegoat killing to say a single intelligent word about the hollow altruism Wikileaks successfully chronicles.
It’s been the American way for a long time, it’s OK as long as you don’t get caught, or if you can kill the guy who caught you before he gets any momentum. Way to go, Joe, that’s just good journalism.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Autocorrection
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 24th, 2010
Observations
{more later but really….}
1) Welcome back Joe Scarborough from your martyrdom operation, and really, just to be clear, no one but Mika missed you. At least the version of Joe who joined Mike Barnicle and decided to shout down the American public outraged by the TSA activity with a “stay out of my way” vitriolic outburst that served as an unobjective embarrassment to your employer.
Of course, no one else agrees with you and they have begun to line up to tell you that perspective is necessary in this world and not to simply rely on some O’Reilly-esque shouting.
Does it matter why we are bringing this up when there is other news? Why do we have to justify our prioritization of this issue because the Koreans are playing chicken? Where were you when someone launched a missile off of Los Angeles? In a secret TSA meeting?
Like I said before, no one asked the airlines before Napolitano, Barnicle, and Scarborough decided to tell the world not to fly. I did opt out today, like I do every Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Only amateurs think that’s a good day to trudge across the country and submit to cavity searches by people who couldn’t solve our security problems at any scale, ever, in their lifetimes.
The TSA does not make us safe. They perpetuate a fraud of government imposed safety to prop up commerce. Any determined party can disrupt this process at its retail level at any time. You currently are advertising that 1-2 out of every 100 people flying will get a more comprehensive search. That system failed during the bus bombing phase of the Isreali-Palistinian standoff. It failed at their borders and in their internal security, yet 11 years later you just trotted it out as a new path to TSA success. You just told 98 of 100 interested terrorizing parties that they will succeed in their operation with the current level of underwear bomb technology juxtaposed with the enhanced TSA process. Great job.
Imagine if you took this technology and tried to stop shoplifting. Not life and death enough for you? OK, try and stop murder via armed robbery at liquor stores. Every 100th visitor got a thorough and privacy reducing screening. Do you think commerce would suffer? Do you think you would stop either crime from occurring? The most successful technique of stopping both has historically been to stop screening and start following the likely culprits until they committed a crime. The same empirical logic transfers cleanly to airport counter-terrorism strategy.
In fact, you could even take this a step further and say that you are making airport terrorism a more likely outcome by misapplying both your limited budget and the trust and cooperation of the flying public by so shamelessly working backwards from a solution. The public thinks you are not solving the problem, have a track record of failure and could be better using what they are paying for and being asked to sacrifice for?
So let’s recap,
-You are shouting, where is that in 'Art Of War'?
-You are outnumbered by people you have previously christened as reasonable
-Using prioritization to liken the TSA story to the British Wedding for its improper attention makes you seem like Fox & Friends
-No one believes you actually have to submit to this stuff yourself, thus that you’re hypocritically preaching
-Everyone caught you playing company man during the LA missile debacle, so this seems to them to follow suit that you’re doing someone else’s bidding
-Your logic and conversation has never once found an opportunity to find the perspective of the airlines, who just don’t need this as part of their marketing mix
-You never once had the self realization that while you were making the ‘only 2% get screened’ dismissive, you were painting a 98% success rate road sign for the wrong people
-And finally in your capacity as an objective journalist, you have willfully reneged on any contract with any fan, viewer, reader or subscriber by absolutely blowing it by weighing the facts and finding judgment that seems more corrupt and compromised than James Traficant running for state treasurer
Welcome back, it’s just the facts.
See you later, or maybe not, haven’t seen if Zbig actually told you this in person, like he normally does.
Observations
{more later but really….}
1) Welcome back Joe Scarborough from your martyrdom operation, and really, just to be clear, no one but Mika missed you. At least the version of Joe who joined Mike Barnicle and decided to shout down the American public outraged by the TSA activity with a “stay out of my way” vitriolic outburst that served as an unobjective embarrassment to your employer.
Of course, no one else agrees with you and they have begun to line up to tell you that perspective is necessary in this world and not to simply rely on some O’Reilly-esque shouting.
Does it matter why we are bringing this up when there is other news? Why do we have to justify our prioritization of this issue because the Koreans are playing chicken? Where were you when someone launched a missile off of Los Angeles? In a secret TSA meeting?
Like I said before, no one asked the airlines before Napolitano, Barnicle, and Scarborough decided to tell the world not to fly. I did opt out today, like I do every Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Only amateurs think that’s a good day to trudge across the country and submit to cavity searches by people who couldn’t solve our security problems at any scale, ever, in their lifetimes.
The TSA does not make us safe. They perpetuate a fraud of government imposed safety to prop up commerce. Any determined party can disrupt this process at its retail level at any time. You currently are advertising that 1-2 out of every 100 people flying will get a more comprehensive search. That system failed during the bus bombing phase of the Isreali-Palistinian standoff. It failed at their borders and in their internal security, yet 11 years later you just trotted it out as a new path to TSA success. You just told 98 of 100 interested terrorizing parties that they will succeed in their operation with the current level of underwear bomb technology juxtaposed with the enhanced TSA process. Great job.
Imagine if you took this technology and tried to stop shoplifting. Not life and death enough for you? OK, try and stop murder via armed robbery at liquor stores. Every 100th visitor got a thorough and privacy reducing screening. Do you think commerce would suffer? Do you think you would stop either crime from occurring? The most successful technique of stopping both has historically been to stop screening and start following the likely culprits until they committed a crime. The same empirical logic transfers cleanly to airport counter-terrorism strategy.
In fact, you could even take this a step further and say that you are making airport terrorism a more likely outcome by misapplying both your limited budget and the trust and cooperation of the flying public by so shamelessly working backwards from a solution. The public thinks you are not solving the problem, have a track record of failure and could be better using what they are paying for and being asked to sacrifice for?
So let’s recap,
-You are shouting, where is that in 'Art Of War'?
-You are outnumbered by people you have previously christened as reasonable
-Using prioritization to liken the TSA story to the British Wedding for its improper attention makes you seem like Fox & Friends
-No one believes you actually have to submit to this stuff yourself, thus that you’re hypocritically preaching
-Everyone caught you playing company man during the LA missile debacle, so this seems to them to follow suit that you’re doing someone else’s bidding
-Your logic and conversation has never once found an opportunity to find the perspective of the airlines, who just don’t need this as part of their marketing mix
-You never once had the self realization that while you were making the ‘only 2% get screened’ dismissive, you were painting a 98% success rate road sign for the wrong people
-And finally in your capacity as an objective journalist, you have willfully reneged on any contract with any fan, viewer, reader or subscriber by absolutely blowing it by weighing the facts and finding judgment that seems more corrupt and compromised than James Traficant running for state treasurer
Welcome back, it’s just the facts.
See you later, or maybe not, haven’t seen if Zbig actually told you this in person, like he normally does.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
For Keith, My Brother
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for the Week ending November 19th, 2010
Observations:
1) It started off innocuous enough, with the Morning Joe cast failing to demonstrate equal vision by taking a “stand” regarding the royal wedding news while stumbling through every media trap set by the Palin family. It was so obviously a double self imposed standard that they were left muttering to themselves on air about why the Palin non news kept getting devoted segments. On two consecutive days this occurred with Palin scoring devoted sets while the gang on Morning Joe attempted to pat itself on the back for its “filtering” of the wedding news. Even Willie got caught up trying to sell his features bit with a line about how the news portion of the show had standards but he could show a horse in a car. It’s really off putting when even Willie Geist loses leverage on what should have been a pretty good one liner because he suddenly realized the show had shown a horse named Palin in a car with zero filter for most of the week.
2) Then the cast took its Reagan era wood chopping technique and trained it on the House not passing unemployment extensions while simultaneously proposing tax breaks for the rich that are nearly 6 times as costly to our deficit. Joe Scarborough trotted out the line and logic that small business owners can’t get people to work for them for 17 dollars an hour because they don’t want to risk losing their unemployment. Like it’s a bad thing. Between the two revenue sources, which one has used the economy to reduce staff at every opportunity in the last two years, and which one has kept up its end of the bargain faithfully ever since the jobs began pouring out of the country? So if I can make 17 bucks an hour is that full time or part time? Does it have a 99 week guarantee of continuous employment or is it a casual? When you find an apples to apples comparison call me, but while interesting, your attempt to explain away the congressional action is really just the banal analysis of someone who has steady work in a ‘haves and have nots’ mentality.
3) No one is talking about the most disturbing element of the Palin presidency. If Sarah Palin rides a populist wave to the White House, she will be in the top office with at best an extension college education and the temperament of a me-first school board opportunist. Who will be her Dick Cheney? Is this the same line of action that brought us George W Bush? He is nice enough but just not of the mold required to be a leader of the free world. It is very interesting that Morning Joe crew and guests use the same ‘intellectual curiosity’ quip in describing Palin but are unable to connect the dots that this was the chief gripe about W.
Somewhere out there is Mr. Burns. Is he with United Technologies or Sempra now? Does he have some shadow elite position in a near government think tank? Was he already chosen as the next steward of our nation in the event that the nation can be stolen by Sarah Palin? We now lucidly acknowledge that the 43rd presidency was largely run by Dick Cheney, that there was an internal coup powered by Bush 41 executives somewhere around 2006 to wrest absolute power away from Cheney in a failed attempt to install Romney as successor, but that in the end it was best to use a placeholder, McCain, once the presidency was a foregone conclusion. This year’s midterms cast a foreboding image of what the next two years hold as the Republican party wants to have multiple paths to reinstalling it’s regime, one with Romney, one with Palin, probably another with Jeb.
4) Speaking of temperament, you have to hand it to the Republicans for having superior temperament. Mainly it’s Bill Maher that speaks to this issue, and shockingly in the Jon Stewart Obama interview, the superior temperament belonged to Stewart. Republicans do what they set out to do and compromise as little as possible. They telegraph that their foreign partnerships are only going to last as long as needed, that nothing is permanent, without any moral hesitation, and with remarkable purpose. It’s not fair, but it’s not a surprise. The lockstep obstruction of the last two years is simply remarkable as an extension of the Dick Cheney remorselessness from the previous regime. Maher’s reflection on compromise when it is really just goading Democrats closer to the Republican line systematically is spot on.
We are watching an erosion of the higher level consciousness in our government to a lower level consistency based attack organization. It appears to the naked eye to be a game of breakout where the obstacles to a Republican return to rule are being cast aside one brick at a time. The Democrats have only a couple of fighters, but a lot of marshmallow place holders who apparently know nothing of Machiavelli’s power vacuum.
I think it’s interesting that Joe Scarborough reads this megatrend and thinks independent candidates are the answer. I feel like he misses Bill Maher’s critical point, that the independent voter just got compromised and cooped, just like the Democratic Party. Independent voters just voted to bring back the architects of the failure because the party of consciousness didn’t appear to them to have the verve to drive the ship through rough seas. Independent voters have just made a type I statistical error. They got the hypothesis right in 2008, but irrationality made a false positive outcome occur in 2010. This is a critical theory for understanding what lies ahead. The voter is nowhere near getting what they want so they are just going to swing 180 degrees every two years. They are not rewarding any success or repudiating any failure anymore, they are simply reacting to the same negative state of things with randomly opposite outcomes.
A graph
Shows what irrational voter outcomes do for the next few election cycles. We will likely be in an economic malaise for some time, and with it the voter will toss out whatever bums they find in office every two years. Unfortunately, the midterms will destabilize the government, but unfortunately for Republicans, randomness favors Democrats during presidential elections.
When the message prevails over the substance, this kind of thing occurs. When reforms are mirages with doublespeak names, this kind of thing occurs. When a Democratic party enters into an unfavorable arena, one that asks it to compromise with an uncompromising adversary, and it lacks the LBJ will to toe its own value line, this kind of thing occurs.
5) John Tyner’s San Diego airport blowup is a martyrdom operation no doubt. He is simply asking that the humiliation stop, that US citizens not be seen as lambs in the face of yet another government contracts scandal. Scandals like subsidies nearly always cause anomalies that can over time turn a normal situation into a boundary-less one that needs citizen revolt to right the ship. In the United States it takes individual attack to correct this stuff, because unlike Greece or France, we have lost out civil protest gene somewhere along the way.
The scandal is clearly the Michael Chertoff lobby effort to install these radiation expelling body scanners, then enforcing their involuntary application by putting a typically Chertoff-draconian negative pat down as the alternative. The pilots aren’t saying it’s an inconvenience, they are saying the machines aren’t safe, and aren’t making us safer.
Neither is wanton disregard for the airline consumer. What other economic opportunities are there for the $500 it cost to fly these days? A washer or some other durable good? An Ipad? A new sofa? My point is that Janet Napolitano has flatly instructed the American consumer to explore alternatives to flying if they don’t want to submit to Chertoff gate. Did she check with the airlines before undermining their marketing message?
It is with untold embarrassment that I admit that this is likely the clearest example yet of an administration that just does not comprehend how business works. It is also confounding why they would dismantle the trust of the TSA, an organization whose trust is vital to the survival of our free and open society? I’m quite frankly on board with opt out day, if I wasn’t busy finding and employing alternatives to flying. Before there was this, there was already an all out war against the airlines for anti consumerism, they didn’t need this kind of help.
6) Speaking of martyrdom, the Joe Scarborough suspension might appear to be a martyrdom operation as well. Politico and Scarborough basically turned themselves in and demanded that MSNBC prosecute them similarly, so that they don’t get trapped later. It is by no means what the title of this week’s rant implies, a statement of support for arch rival Keith Olbermann. It is a self serving cleansing to undermine later turmoil before it starts.
Hey Phil Griffin, for those two days, I’m available, and I could fix a lot of stuff.
That’s all for now, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) It started off innocuous enough, with the Morning Joe cast failing to demonstrate equal vision by taking a “stand” regarding the royal wedding news while stumbling through every media trap set by the Palin family. It was so obviously a double self imposed standard that they were left muttering to themselves on air about why the Palin non news kept getting devoted segments. On two consecutive days this occurred with Palin scoring devoted sets while the gang on Morning Joe attempted to pat itself on the back for its “filtering” of the wedding news. Even Willie got caught up trying to sell his features bit with a line about how the news portion of the show had standards but he could show a horse in a car. It’s really off putting when even Willie Geist loses leverage on what should have been a pretty good one liner because he suddenly realized the show had shown a horse named Palin in a car with zero filter for most of the week.
2) Then the cast took its Reagan era wood chopping technique and trained it on the House not passing unemployment extensions while simultaneously proposing tax breaks for the rich that are nearly 6 times as costly to our deficit. Joe Scarborough trotted out the line and logic that small business owners can’t get people to work for them for 17 dollars an hour because they don’t want to risk losing their unemployment. Like it’s a bad thing. Between the two revenue sources, which one has used the economy to reduce staff at every opportunity in the last two years, and which one has kept up its end of the bargain faithfully ever since the jobs began pouring out of the country? So if I can make 17 bucks an hour is that full time or part time? Does it have a 99 week guarantee of continuous employment or is it a casual? When you find an apples to apples comparison call me, but while interesting, your attempt to explain away the congressional action is really just the banal analysis of someone who has steady work in a ‘haves and have nots’ mentality.
3) No one is talking about the most disturbing element of the Palin presidency. If Sarah Palin rides a populist wave to the White House, she will be in the top office with at best an extension college education and the temperament of a me-first school board opportunist. Who will be her Dick Cheney? Is this the same line of action that brought us George W Bush? He is nice enough but just not of the mold required to be a leader of the free world. It is very interesting that Morning Joe crew and guests use the same ‘intellectual curiosity’ quip in describing Palin but are unable to connect the dots that this was the chief gripe about W.
Somewhere out there is Mr. Burns. Is he with United Technologies or Sempra now? Does he have some shadow elite position in a near government think tank? Was he already chosen as the next steward of our nation in the event that the nation can be stolen by Sarah Palin? We now lucidly acknowledge that the 43rd presidency was largely run by Dick Cheney, that there was an internal coup powered by Bush 41 executives somewhere around 2006 to wrest absolute power away from Cheney in a failed attempt to install Romney as successor, but that in the end it was best to use a placeholder, McCain, once the presidency was a foregone conclusion. This year’s midterms cast a foreboding image of what the next two years hold as the Republican party wants to have multiple paths to reinstalling it’s regime, one with Romney, one with Palin, probably another with Jeb.
4) Speaking of temperament, you have to hand it to the Republicans for having superior temperament. Mainly it’s Bill Maher that speaks to this issue, and shockingly in the Jon Stewart Obama interview, the superior temperament belonged to Stewart. Republicans do what they set out to do and compromise as little as possible. They telegraph that their foreign partnerships are only going to last as long as needed, that nothing is permanent, without any moral hesitation, and with remarkable purpose. It’s not fair, but it’s not a surprise. The lockstep obstruction of the last two years is simply remarkable as an extension of the Dick Cheney remorselessness from the previous regime. Maher’s reflection on compromise when it is really just goading Democrats closer to the Republican line systematically is spot on.
We are watching an erosion of the higher level consciousness in our government to a lower level consistency based attack organization. It appears to the naked eye to be a game of breakout where the obstacles to a Republican return to rule are being cast aside one brick at a time. The Democrats have only a couple of fighters, but a lot of marshmallow place holders who apparently know nothing of Machiavelli’s power vacuum.
I think it’s interesting that Joe Scarborough reads this megatrend and thinks independent candidates are the answer. I feel like he misses Bill Maher’s critical point, that the independent voter just got compromised and cooped, just like the Democratic Party. Independent voters just voted to bring back the architects of the failure because the party of consciousness didn’t appear to them to have the verve to drive the ship through rough seas. Independent voters have just made a type I statistical error. They got the hypothesis right in 2008, but irrationality made a false positive outcome occur in 2010. This is a critical theory for understanding what lies ahead. The voter is nowhere near getting what they want so they are just going to swing 180 degrees every two years. They are not rewarding any success or repudiating any failure anymore, they are simply reacting to the same negative state of things with randomly opposite outcomes.
A graph
Shows what irrational voter outcomes do for the next few election cycles. We will likely be in an economic malaise for some time, and with it the voter will toss out whatever bums they find in office every two years. Unfortunately, the midterms will destabilize the government, but unfortunately for Republicans, randomness favors Democrats during presidential elections.
When the message prevails over the substance, this kind of thing occurs. When reforms are mirages with doublespeak names, this kind of thing occurs. When a Democratic party enters into an unfavorable arena, one that asks it to compromise with an uncompromising adversary, and it lacks the LBJ will to toe its own value line, this kind of thing occurs.
5) John Tyner’s San Diego airport blowup is a martyrdom operation no doubt. He is simply asking that the humiliation stop, that US citizens not be seen as lambs in the face of yet another government contracts scandal. Scandals like subsidies nearly always cause anomalies that can over time turn a normal situation into a boundary-less one that needs citizen revolt to right the ship. In the United States it takes individual attack to correct this stuff, because unlike Greece or France, we have lost out civil protest gene somewhere along the way.
The scandal is clearly the Michael Chertoff lobby effort to install these radiation expelling body scanners, then enforcing their involuntary application by putting a typically Chertoff-draconian negative pat down as the alternative. The pilots aren’t saying it’s an inconvenience, they are saying the machines aren’t safe, and aren’t making us safer.
Neither is wanton disregard for the airline consumer. What other economic opportunities are there for the $500 it cost to fly these days? A washer or some other durable good? An Ipad? A new sofa? My point is that Janet Napolitano has flatly instructed the American consumer to explore alternatives to flying if they don’t want to submit to Chertoff gate. Did she check with the airlines before undermining their marketing message?
It is with untold embarrassment that I admit that this is likely the clearest example yet of an administration that just does not comprehend how business works. It is also confounding why they would dismantle the trust of the TSA, an organization whose trust is vital to the survival of our free and open society? I’m quite frankly on board with opt out day, if I wasn’t busy finding and employing alternatives to flying. Before there was this, there was already an all out war against the airlines for anti consumerism, they didn’t need this kind of help.
6) Speaking of martyrdom, the Joe Scarborough suspension might appear to be a martyrdom operation as well. Politico and Scarborough basically turned themselves in and demanded that MSNBC prosecute them similarly, so that they don’t get trapped later. It is by no means what the title of this week’s rant implies, a statement of support for arch rival Keith Olbermann. It is a self serving cleansing to undermine later turmoil before it starts.
Hey Phil Griffin, for those two days, I’m available, and I could fix a lot of stuff.
That’s all for now, see you Monday.
Friday, November 12, 2010
When Will The Thrashing Stop?
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 12th, 2010
Observations:
1) Dylan Ratigan is a Mona Lisa of unexplained complexity. His efforts on the show today dragged the conversation up the food chain from the superficial to the, well, less superficial. Dylan explained to America that you can cut all you want but that austerity is not an equation for recapitalization. Wait, I did that in 14 words, it took Dylan 5400 and his message was diluted for its lack of cohesion.
Fresh off of his voter suppression efforts, Joe Scarborough was all to happy to edit out the progressive message that dubbed the deficit commission the “cat food commission”. That is suppression of another kind, but Joe’s greater argument that the extremes on both sides unduly control the debate allows this kind of editing. He has a point, a point I wish I could recall him enforcing in August of 2009 at the heat of the death panel scare.
So it was a great relief that Dylan couldn’t control the conversation and that Joe could just mock his inability to boil a matter down. It was a great relief because it would show that had Dylan not been there and Joe would have interviewed David Walker by himself, they would have never brought up revenue. That conversation, which happens way too often on Morning Joe, the one void of depth and in shallow pursuit of a key operating objective, exposes the show to its chief criticism that it only finds depth accidentally but left to its own devices is a magnet for superficiality.
Bravo for the show’s self awareness, for it’s relentless pursuit of depth, for knowing that if it was just Joe and Mika talking they would aggregate to less than Bill Karin’s segment.
Now if only Dylan could take an extension class on clarity, or at least the transfer of clarity from one’s mind to one’s rocket ship.
2) Not since the southeastern gas crisis in 2008 have we seen such an effort to blackout the media. I am of course talking about the rocket launch that occurred Monday off of the coast of California and has been dismissed with the most juvenile assertions from the government, its as if they are begging the country to dig deeper.
I can’t in good faith go into the story, as it would just lump me in with the Mel Gibson ‘Conspiracy Theory’ crowd, but I often look at the Morning Joe show as a bellwether for this blackout lever. Why? Because Joe Scarborough is at once very close to the intelligence community of Washington, DC, and a terrible, terrible liar. He is so bad at acting that when the obligatory brush off move comes up like it did 2 days ago on the air live, you can actually learn quite a bit about ‘the fix’ by watching his mannerisms.
I know, I know, that show “Lie To Me” is one of my wife’s favorite shows, and this is me telephoning some misperception of that process. I get it that it’s easy to criticize.
But what I saw stuck with me the same way James Woods still sticks with his story about seeing the dry run for 9/11. It was as if a really scared guy at the NSA was on the earpiece that Chris Licht normally operates whispering “look down, kill the story, move on quick, OK, we may have gotten away with it”. That same guy probably went to a meeting later and described Joe Scarborough’s inability to have a poker face in these situations a tragedy heretofore known as “the Scarborough situation”
What is the CIA going to do about “the Scarborough situation”
3) In other self serving suppression news, Morning Joe ran with a Politico based repeal health care story today without referencing the new uninsured figure of 59 million Americans. The election last week proves beyond a doubt that left to it’s own devices, the Americans who retain health care or financial wherewithal will act like chapter 7 of ‘Lord Of The Flies” all the way down the decline of our civilization.
The point is best represented by expatriates. I know someone who recently moved to Australia, and Morning Joe had an opportunity to run this Politico story while Chrystia Freeland was on the set. These people know that US healthcare is a giant Ponzi scheme at this point, and that other governments have systems in place that allow them to better compete in the global marketplace via a healthier population.
These expatriates look at what’s going on here and tell you the truth in the first ten minutes of the conversation. But left to our own devices, all of the central points of the Moynihan segment, Joe’s own don’t subscribe to political parties segments, the Jon Stewart segment about where the real conversation should be, are all lost in the wave of Morning Joe’s magic wand. Why say you hate the extremist controlling the argument, when on the same show on the same day, you reinstall the semantic system of demonizing solutions for the good of political control?
It was the same show, it wasn’t some amalgam of some month’s work, it was just today’s show. We are losing ground on health care every day and need a solution. And just like austerity is not a solution, but a dimension to an overall economic plan, you cannot just stick steely knives into solutions to a health care crisis for political gain.
Here is the right way forward. Listen close. Repeal will be a political loser. Get those things you wanted included last time, and make them phase 2 of the big fix. Be a solution seller. Get the state lines situation fixed, the anti trust exemption fixed, and fix the microeconomic incentive in a way that allows the customer to choose services and participate in the cost curve. Trade the mandate for that. Make your free market improvements alongside what Obama got done. But if you’re on the repeal team because ‘elections have consequences’, you’ve got 40, maybe just 20, months to live.
Keep calm and carry on, despite the missiles overhead
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Dylan Ratigan is a Mona Lisa of unexplained complexity. His efforts on the show today dragged the conversation up the food chain from the superficial to the, well, less superficial. Dylan explained to America that you can cut all you want but that austerity is not an equation for recapitalization. Wait, I did that in 14 words, it took Dylan 5400 and his message was diluted for its lack of cohesion.
Fresh off of his voter suppression efforts, Joe Scarborough was all to happy to edit out the progressive message that dubbed the deficit commission the “cat food commission”. That is suppression of another kind, but Joe’s greater argument that the extremes on both sides unduly control the debate allows this kind of editing. He has a point, a point I wish I could recall him enforcing in August of 2009 at the heat of the death panel scare.
So it was a great relief that Dylan couldn’t control the conversation and that Joe could just mock his inability to boil a matter down. It was a great relief because it would show that had Dylan not been there and Joe would have interviewed David Walker by himself, they would have never brought up revenue. That conversation, which happens way too often on Morning Joe, the one void of depth and in shallow pursuit of a key operating objective, exposes the show to its chief criticism that it only finds depth accidentally but left to its own devices is a magnet for superficiality.
Bravo for the show’s self awareness, for it’s relentless pursuit of depth, for knowing that if it was just Joe and Mika talking they would aggregate to less than Bill Karin’s segment.
Now if only Dylan could take an extension class on clarity, or at least the transfer of clarity from one’s mind to one’s rocket ship.
2) Not since the southeastern gas crisis in 2008 have we seen such an effort to blackout the media. I am of course talking about the rocket launch that occurred Monday off of the coast of California and has been dismissed with the most juvenile assertions from the government, its as if they are begging the country to dig deeper.
I can’t in good faith go into the story, as it would just lump me in with the Mel Gibson ‘Conspiracy Theory’ crowd, but I often look at the Morning Joe show as a bellwether for this blackout lever. Why? Because Joe Scarborough is at once very close to the intelligence community of Washington, DC, and a terrible, terrible liar. He is so bad at acting that when the obligatory brush off move comes up like it did 2 days ago on the air live, you can actually learn quite a bit about ‘the fix’ by watching his mannerisms.
I know, I know, that show “Lie To Me” is one of my wife’s favorite shows, and this is me telephoning some misperception of that process. I get it that it’s easy to criticize.
But what I saw stuck with me the same way James Woods still sticks with his story about seeing the dry run for 9/11. It was as if a really scared guy at the NSA was on the earpiece that Chris Licht normally operates whispering “look down, kill the story, move on quick, OK, we may have gotten away with it”. That same guy probably went to a meeting later and described Joe Scarborough’s inability to have a poker face in these situations a tragedy heretofore known as “the Scarborough situation”
What is the CIA going to do about “the Scarborough situation”
3) In other self serving suppression news, Morning Joe ran with a Politico based repeal health care story today without referencing the new uninsured figure of 59 million Americans. The election last week proves beyond a doubt that left to it’s own devices, the Americans who retain health care or financial wherewithal will act like chapter 7 of ‘Lord Of The Flies” all the way down the decline of our civilization.
The point is best represented by expatriates. I know someone who recently moved to Australia, and Morning Joe had an opportunity to run this Politico story while Chrystia Freeland was on the set. These people know that US healthcare is a giant Ponzi scheme at this point, and that other governments have systems in place that allow them to better compete in the global marketplace via a healthier population.
These expatriates look at what’s going on here and tell you the truth in the first ten minutes of the conversation. But left to our own devices, all of the central points of the Moynihan segment, Joe’s own don’t subscribe to political parties segments, the Jon Stewart segment about where the real conversation should be, are all lost in the wave of Morning Joe’s magic wand. Why say you hate the extremist controlling the argument, when on the same show on the same day, you reinstall the semantic system of demonizing solutions for the good of political control?
It was the same show, it wasn’t some amalgam of some month’s work, it was just today’s show. We are losing ground on health care every day and need a solution. And just like austerity is not a solution, but a dimension to an overall economic plan, you cannot just stick steely knives into solutions to a health care crisis for political gain.
Here is the right way forward. Listen close. Repeal will be a political loser. Get those things you wanted included last time, and make them phase 2 of the big fix. Be a solution seller. Get the state lines situation fixed, the anti trust exemption fixed, and fix the microeconomic incentive in a way that allows the customer to choose services and participate in the cost curve. Trade the mandate for that. Make your free market improvements alongside what Obama got done. But if you’re on the repeal team because ‘elections have consequences’, you’ve got 40, maybe just 20, months to live.
Keep calm and carry on, despite the missiles overhead
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Nice Job Morning Joe You Helped Steal An Election
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for Election Day, 2010
Observations:
1) I guess I should have known when there was a managed media blackout on Morning Joe suppressing coverage of the gulf oil spill, that the show was doing a bit of a dry run in preparation to be that outpost on MSNBC that emulates Fox News’ efforts to suppress the progressive vote.
On the surface, it all seems so reasonable, Joe is a right leaning guy, his henchmen Halperin and Buchanan have a vested interest in the outcome, so why all the surprise that they would perform a service to the ruling class by convincing voters that they need no longer participate in the democratic process, for it is a foregone conclusion that the 78% unfavorable Republicans will be handed the halls of the nation’s legislature.
The demonization of progress, the irrationality of scapegoating the wrong guy for all the job losses, and the indescribably logic free notion that further enriching the ultra rich is the way out of the economic downturn caused by the net effect of the last wealth transfer is stunning for it's myopic effectiveness.
Joe Scarborough is guilty for terming the next step of the disintegration of the middle class necessary progress, and that step is this pre-ordained Republican victory. You can’t waste your days hoping Ed Schultz will bust on the set and beat Scarborough’s ass (you know he wants to), you just have to know what is happening around you and figure out your next step.
2) This notion of voter suppression is so irrational that it may be a greater mystery than what causes cancer.
We all know that the final margin in the Reagan – Carter presidential was drastically affected by the media coverage handing the country to Reagan before anyone from Colorado to the Pacific Ocean had voted. The margin of victory was significantly widened when those states that amalgamate to a huge progressive voting block, became suddenly disaffected voters. The undercard elections in those states swung mercilessly right and outcomes throughout the west were distorted by unprecedented leaps, resulting in permanent damage.
This phenomenon has driven strict media rules that for the most part don’t help at all, because of the nature of new media, and it’s ability to move information around any attempt to suppress.
So here we are today and the lessons, not the constructive ones that had us trying to curb election steering by showing the eastern state's results, but the diabolical ones about how a person stays home if you convince him it’s a lost cause, are now part and parcel to modern political science. The election process of buying media advertisements and debating is an expensive stalemate process. The new needle mover is voter suppression, and the historic turnout in 2008 is the greatest threat to future Republican power holds, the simple fact being the return on investment is greater in this arena than the traditional campaign tactics.
The evidence is as simple as looking at what mandated voting would look like. There would be two drastic effects: a devaluation of the white vote, and an end to the effectiveness of gerrymandering. Oh there would be one other effect, a Democratic super majority for the foreseeable future, and an end to the current corporate control of the nation’s capital. If you’re a Republican, a white person interested in retaining control of the politics of the United States, or a chamber of commerce, voter suppression is vital to your survival.
3) Social Media could produce the next step necessary in modern politics. For lack of a better descriptive, Facebook or its nextgen could be the architecture for a form of a witch-hunt that could use its loose interpretation of privacy to build a virtual inventory of the voter base. Add in one sprinkle of Google maps or Zillow real estate chronicling, and there could be an available tracking of who is voting and who is not, and pressure could be applied to those submitting to voter suppression to endear upon them the patriotic loss that goes with their missing vote.
That’s right, I said it, I have extreme disdain for the 60% who will hand power elsewhere today. It’s on my list of national crises and I want answers from those people. I had a very good chance this election cycle when Meg Whitman suddenly wanted to control the California governor’s office despite here disinterest in voting until the age of 46. That kind of hypocrisy is a punishable event, and 150 million dollars is a good riddance deserved.
But as an equal opportunist in this realm, I have equal disdain for people who attend protests, there aren’t enough recent examples if you’ve noticed, but who have an imperfect record of participating in the voting process. The last time there was a solid protest schedule was in the run up to the Iraq war. I felt then and I feel now that those protests were hollow because of how many of the participants didn’t vote. I irrationally think people who did not vote should be arrested if they attend a protest for their hypocrisy. The net effect is the protests ran out of gas, and protest have become more and more diluted and easily policed in this country.
Largely disintegrated by our lack of a Democratic credibility, we Americans can only watch with confused admiration while French and Greek citizens keep their governments in exponentially more effective check. The reason is so simple, yet today we risk a dangerous repeat of our irrational path. The reason is we think its OK to hand the government to agents of our demise via voter attrition to the tune of 60%.
Various elements of the corporate interest have actually broken away from the indirect suppressive effort and tried to run ads that simply told people who weren’t going to vote in their favor to not vote. Those ads never made it to the airwaves but you would never know it given the coverage they received from the media. It’s a modern phenomenon that you can run this stuff knowing that it won’t actually be televised on a paid basis, but you will have a publicity effect for your message because it’s so extreme that it can be called news, despite it’s blatant marketing composition. Was the media duped? No, they consider this stuff tools to their ultimate goal.
Joe Scarborough has been projecting wishful thinking since 1994. This is his most successful year. It is much easier to effect the country from a commercial pulpit, and he is really ready to cement his will on the nation from here for a long time. It’s evident that he became interested in his electability late last year, and got his answer: stay in media. No background checks, deserved or not, and no fact checks. You can go on forever in this environment, that is unless any of the changes that need to happen see the light of day: campaign finance reform, disassociation of lobby interests from congress, and a comprehensive study on the process of steering our politics via formerly objective journalism.
4) How can I make these outlandish claims? In the 3 hours of Morning Joe directly adjacent to the mid term election, there were Pulitzer Prize winning left leaning journalists, there was the DNC chair, and there was Scarborough going after any Republican that claims to be ready to solve any problems as having no credibility.
To me, the left elements of the show were pure capitulation, lead by Mika Brzezinski, in one of her finest Alan Colmes moments. Eugene Robinson seemed forlorn, and Tim Kaine seemed just as delusional as when he began the malpractice he calls his tenure at the top of the Democratic Party.
John Stewart captured the same delusional moment from DCCC chair Van Hollen. Stewart then called it delusional. Shock, he called a spade a spade.
It all seems so credible when presented on the show, but as Zbigniew Brzezinski has indicated conclusively, Morning Joe is the most extreme example of superficial objectivity currently being televised. At least Fox makes no illusion of really being fair and balanced. The roots of the superficiality are the extreme talent of Joe Scarborough at taking distorted anecdote and turning it into a mantra for governing, no matter how falsely based.
Wow, and you are going to fall for it.
Observations:
1) I guess I should have known when there was a managed media blackout on Morning Joe suppressing coverage of the gulf oil spill, that the show was doing a bit of a dry run in preparation to be that outpost on MSNBC that emulates Fox News’ efforts to suppress the progressive vote.
On the surface, it all seems so reasonable, Joe is a right leaning guy, his henchmen Halperin and Buchanan have a vested interest in the outcome, so why all the surprise that they would perform a service to the ruling class by convincing voters that they need no longer participate in the democratic process, for it is a foregone conclusion that the 78% unfavorable Republicans will be handed the halls of the nation’s legislature.
The demonization of progress, the irrationality of scapegoating the wrong guy for all the job losses, and the indescribably logic free notion that further enriching the ultra rich is the way out of the economic downturn caused by the net effect of the last wealth transfer is stunning for it's myopic effectiveness.
Joe Scarborough is guilty for terming the next step of the disintegration of the middle class necessary progress, and that step is this pre-ordained Republican victory. You can’t waste your days hoping Ed Schultz will bust on the set and beat Scarborough’s ass (you know he wants to), you just have to know what is happening around you and figure out your next step.
2) This notion of voter suppression is so irrational that it may be a greater mystery than what causes cancer.
We all know that the final margin in the Reagan – Carter presidential was drastically affected by the media coverage handing the country to Reagan before anyone from Colorado to the Pacific Ocean had voted. The margin of victory was significantly widened when those states that amalgamate to a huge progressive voting block, became suddenly disaffected voters. The undercard elections in those states swung mercilessly right and outcomes throughout the west were distorted by unprecedented leaps, resulting in permanent damage.
This phenomenon has driven strict media rules that for the most part don’t help at all, because of the nature of new media, and it’s ability to move information around any attempt to suppress.
So here we are today and the lessons, not the constructive ones that had us trying to curb election steering by showing the eastern state's results, but the diabolical ones about how a person stays home if you convince him it’s a lost cause, are now part and parcel to modern political science. The election process of buying media advertisements and debating is an expensive stalemate process. The new needle mover is voter suppression, and the historic turnout in 2008 is the greatest threat to future Republican power holds, the simple fact being the return on investment is greater in this arena than the traditional campaign tactics.
The evidence is as simple as looking at what mandated voting would look like. There would be two drastic effects: a devaluation of the white vote, and an end to the effectiveness of gerrymandering. Oh there would be one other effect, a Democratic super majority for the foreseeable future, and an end to the current corporate control of the nation’s capital. If you’re a Republican, a white person interested in retaining control of the politics of the United States, or a chamber of commerce, voter suppression is vital to your survival.
3) Social Media could produce the next step necessary in modern politics. For lack of a better descriptive, Facebook or its nextgen could be the architecture for a form of a witch-hunt that could use its loose interpretation of privacy to build a virtual inventory of the voter base. Add in one sprinkle of Google maps or Zillow real estate chronicling, and there could be an available tracking of who is voting and who is not, and pressure could be applied to those submitting to voter suppression to endear upon them the patriotic loss that goes with their missing vote.
That’s right, I said it, I have extreme disdain for the 60% who will hand power elsewhere today. It’s on my list of national crises and I want answers from those people. I had a very good chance this election cycle when Meg Whitman suddenly wanted to control the California governor’s office despite here disinterest in voting until the age of 46. That kind of hypocrisy is a punishable event, and 150 million dollars is a good riddance deserved.
But as an equal opportunist in this realm, I have equal disdain for people who attend protests, there aren’t enough recent examples if you’ve noticed, but who have an imperfect record of participating in the voting process. The last time there was a solid protest schedule was in the run up to the Iraq war. I felt then and I feel now that those protests were hollow because of how many of the participants didn’t vote. I irrationally think people who did not vote should be arrested if they attend a protest for their hypocrisy. The net effect is the protests ran out of gas, and protest have become more and more diluted and easily policed in this country.
Largely disintegrated by our lack of a Democratic credibility, we Americans can only watch with confused admiration while French and Greek citizens keep their governments in exponentially more effective check. The reason is so simple, yet today we risk a dangerous repeat of our irrational path. The reason is we think its OK to hand the government to agents of our demise via voter attrition to the tune of 60%.
Various elements of the corporate interest have actually broken away from the indirect suppressive effort and tried to run ads that simply told people who weren’t going to vote in their favor to not vote. Those ads never made it to the airwaves but you would never know it given the coverage they received from the media. It’s a modern phenomenon that you can run this stuff knowing that it won’t actually be televised on a paid basis, but you will have a publicity effect for your message because it’s so extreme that it can be called news, despite it’s blatant marketing composition. Was the media duped? No, they consider this stuff tools to their ultimate goal.
Joe Scarborough has been projecting wishful thinking since 1994. This is his most successful year. It is much easier to effect the country from a commercial pulpit, and he is really ready to cement his will on the nation from here for a long time. It’s evident that he became interested in his electability late last year, and got his answer: stay in media. No background checks, deserved or not, and no fact checks. You can go on forever in this environment, that is unless any of the changes that need to happen see the light of day: campaign finance reform, disassociation of lobby interests from congress, and a comprehensive study on the process of steering our politics via formerly objective journalism.
4) How can I make these outlandish claims? In the 3 hours of Morning Joe directly adjacent to the mid term election, there were Pulitzer Prize winning left leaning journalists, there was the DNC chair, and there was Scarborough going after any Republican that claims to be ready to solve any problems as having no credibility.
To me, the left elements of the show were pure capitulation, lead by Mika Brzezinski, in one of her finest Alan Colmes moments. Eugene Robinson seemed forlorn, and Tim Kaine seemed just as delusional as when he began the malpractice he calls his tenure at the top of the Democratic Party.
John Stewart captured the same delusional moment from DCCC chair Van Hollen. Stewart then called it delusional. Shock, he called a spade a spade.
It all seems so credible when presented on the show, but as Zbigniew Brzezinski has indicated conclusively, Morning Joe is the most extreme example of superficial objectivity currently being televised. At least Fox makes no illusion of really being fair and balanced. The roots of the superficiality are the extreme talent of Joe Scarborough at taking distorted anecdote and turning it into a mantra for governing, no matter how falsely based.
Wow, and you are going to fall for it.
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